Saturday, July 29, 2017

Why are Americans So Unhealthy?

Financial FAQs

Americans have just avoided a health care disaster in voting down the
Senate’s ‘skinny’ Obamacare Repeal and Replace bill. Even though maintaining
most of the taxes to pay for the Medicaid portion, it would have made insurance
coverage prohibitively expensive for those older and sicker users with the
removal of the private and employer mandate requirements that would cause
younger and healthier people to leave the insurance markets.

This is really the latest precipice that’s been averted. Americans
already have the worst health outcomes in the developed world, precisely because
America is the only developed country—in fact, of most of the rest of the
undeveloped world—that doesn’t have universal coverage.

The result is one of the highest birth death rates, as well as heart,
diabetes, and infectious disease rates—which are diseases usually associated
with poorer, undeveloped countries and regions.

Why has this happened in the America? Because Americans have the worst income
inequality in the developed world, according to the CIA World Factbook. And
studies have shown that those countries with the greatest inequality also rank
lowest in healthcare benefits.

The U.S. ranks 106th of the 149 countries in income inequality as
ranked by the CIA’s
World Factbook; with a Gini inequality index of developing countries like
Peru and Cameroon. Whereas Finland and the Scandinavian countries are at the top
of equality rankings, as I’ve highlighted in past columns. The higher
the index in the graph, the greater the gap between wealthy and poorer citizens
of a country’s population.

This is while congress has even been attempting to take away Medicaid
benefits for the poor, elderly and infirmed? It doesn’t compute. Just 3
Senators—Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and John McCain—were courageous enough to
stand up to the conservative lobbies that would only worsen healthcare outcomes.

What if conservatives had succeeded in repealing Obamacare? “Republicans'
Obamacare repeal bill would leave 17 million more people uninsured next year,
and 32 million more in 2026, the Congressional Budget Office said in an estimate Wednesday. It also
said premiums would double by 2026. …By 2026, three quarters of the
population would live in areas with no insurers participating in the non-group
market, due to upward pressure on premiums and downward pressure on enrollment,
the report found.”

On the other hand, a 2016 Commonwealth
Club study lists Obamacare’s many benefits. “…evidence indicates that the
ACA has likely acted as an economic stimulus, in part by freeing up private and
public resources for investment in jobs and production capacity. Moreover, the
law’s payment and other cost-related reforms appear to have contributed to the
marked slowdown in health spending growth seen in recent
years.”

Some of those benefits are:

· Health care spending growth per person—both public and private—has slowed
for five years.

· A number of ACA reforms, particularly related to Medicare, have likely
contributed to the slowdown in health care spending growth by tightening
provider payment rates and introducing incentives to reduce excess costs.

· Faster-than-expected economic growth and slower-than-expected health care
spending have led to multiple downward revisions of the federal deficit and
projected deficits.
· These trends have also been a boon to state and local government budgets,
as job growth has improved state tax revenues while cost growth in health care
programs has slowed. At the same time, expanding insurance to millions of people
who were previously uninsured has supported local health systems and enhanced
families’ ability to pay for necessities, including health care.

· The accrued savings in health care spending relative to their projected
growth prior to the ACA are substantial: Medicare alone is now projected to
spend $1 trillion less between 2010 and 2020.

We can thank Senators Merkowski, Collins, and McCain that the so-called
‘freedom’ lobbies behind the Obamacare repeal efforts have not succeeded in
making more Americans ill. I don’t even want to imagine the increased death
totals due to lack of care of the 32 million aged and infirm that could
ultimately lose their coverage.

So now is the time, in Senator McCain’s words, for Republicans and Democrats
to work together in “regular order” to craft a truly bipartisan healthcare bill that could actually improve the health of Americans.

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Harlan Russell Green, Editor/Publisher

Harlan Green is a Mortgage Broker in Santa Barbara, California since the 1980s and economist. As Editor/Publisher of PopularEconomics.com, he has published 3 weekly columns-- Popular Economics Weekly, Financial FAQs, and The Mortgage Corner-since 2000, and is a featured business columnist for Huffington Post. Please refer to the populareconomics.com website for further information.